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Bravely Default [3DS]

So who else besides me has had the pleasure of picking up this gem?

This Ode to the RPGs of old. The days of good single player Final Fantasies, Chrono Triggers, Earth Bounds and Lufias.

Yeah, it's that good, at least so far. You see, I'm not finished with the game. Not by a long shot. In fact I am still pretty much sitting at the beginning, in Chapter 1 still to be exact. My characters levels are in the early 20s though and my job levels hovering around 6 +/-. My Norende is approaching completion though (if you don't have the game you probably don't know what that means, but that's okay).

But already I can tell this is a fantastic game and very well made. It stea-er.. *cough* borrows heavily from the Final Fantasy series but considering this is a Square-Enix game, that's not a huge shocker. You can expect to see job classes you would expect to see in a Final Fantasy game and they really don't even try to change the name or appearance that much. White Mage, Black Mage, Red Mage to name a few and yes, they even resemble the FF counterparts in color scheme. White being white and red and very much a main healer with some light attack magics. Black Mage is well.. what you would expect a Black Mage to be, and Red Mage ..exactly that.

The game does have some Tales-esque party chat dialogue as well which helps to further flesh out character personas. But the job system is something straight out of FF Tactics/FFIII (and several other FF games), but it goes into it a little further than just that. Reminiscent of FFXI I'd say, you can have a secondary job that you can also use abilities and support abilities (basically always active traits) from to further diversify how you play the job you set each character to, assuming you've leveled the job enough to unlock useful abilities.

And there's special moves as well, based off of weapon types and there's a variety of typical fantasy weaponry to use in the game, with each job excelling at specific yet appropriate weapon types. This Special moves, aside from doing what ever damage, healing, or support move it is they do also give additional buffs to your party afterwards and multiple characters can chain specials to in effect super buff your party for short durations of time after the special move has been used. Yet you can just go all willy-nilly and use Special Moves whenever you want, that wouldn't make them 'special' now would it. Each weapon type has a specific thing that must be done to make the Special Moves available for use, and there are a total of 3 tiers of special moves for each weapon type; which all have the same unlocks per weapon but each tier requires you to do the unlock req. more in order to be able to use the higher tier Special Moves.

Beyond that, you can also modify the effects of the special moves, even down to simply renaming them and what your characters say when doing them. Now, obviously you can't do all of this at once, but the unlocks aren't terribly hard to obtain and customization is pretty darn fun, not to mention useful.

Visually this game is a treat. All of the areas have a hand drawn 2Dish feel to them, yet are presented in a very amazing 3D environment. The music, pretty top notch and what you might want to expect from a good SE RPG. Voice acting is also, at least in my opinion, very well done. Each voice represents each character perfectly, again, imo. But if you like to listen to Japanese voices like some people do, that is an option as well, with subtitles of course.. unless you're fluent, then kudos to you.

Then there's the neat fact that you can pretty much tailor the games difficulty to however you want it. But making it too easy (by vastly decreasing encounter rates) isn't something I would suggest (the game even warns you that this option, while making the immediate game easier to play through, will actually make boss encounters very hard). This is because you won't have gotten as much experience points and job points to make your characters stronger, or as much money in order to upgrade your characters with better gear and new spells and items.

However the flip side is if you really like punishment, you can turn off Exp gain, money gain, and Job points gain and raise your encounter rates why 100% and try to tackle things that way. I'm not going to, but uh.. yeah that's me. I have raised the encounter rates by 50% though, makes for good farming.

Did I mention you even can change the speed of the battle animations so that battles play through quicker, after you input your commands. This is also something useful if you're just trying to level up/farm Job points or experience or money quickly in an area that's giving you a good amount of that stuff.

And then we get to the slightly interactive part. Got friends on your friendslist? Do they have Bravely Default too? Awesome, you can import one of their characters (they assign which) and that character can be summoned in battle to do a special move that your friend has set up, complete with their own set up, ability names and character sayings. You can also link abilities of that character to 1 of your 4 characters so basically if your friend has a job leveled up much higher than you do, you can use those abilities and support abilities to buff your own character up. If you have 4 friends with Bravely Default you can have all 4 of your characters linked to the character they send. It's pretty neat.

I currently have 2 openings in my game for people to link up. Interested? PM me with your friend code and ill send you mine.